The World Wide Web (WWW) or simply, the “Web” is the well-known collection of interlinked hypertext documents hosted at a vast number of computer resources (“hosts”) communicatively coupled to one another over networks of computer networks known as the Internet. These documents, which may include text, multimedia files and images, are typically viewed as web pages with the aid of a web browser—a software application running on a user's computer system. Collections of related web pages that can be addressed relative to a common uniform resource locator (URL) are known as websites, and are typically hosted on one or more web servers accessible via the Internet.
In recent years, websites featuring user-generated content (UGC), that is content created and posted to websites by end-users, have become increasingly popular. UGC accounts for a wide variety of content, including news, gossip, audio-video productions, photography and social commentary, to name but a few. Content of this sort may be presented in any of a variety of forms, including web logs (blogs), comments regarding website editor-created content (e.g., user reviews of products being offered for sale at a website), status updates on social networking sites, and question and answer databases commonly known as forums.
Advertisers were quick to recognize the potential power of the Web as it concerns access to potential consumers of goods and services. Models for capitalizing on the insertion of advertisements into websites quickly sprang up. Such advertisements came in various forms, including banner ads, which appear across portions of a web page, and sponsored links, which typically appear in designated sections of search result pages. However, many Web users find such advertisements to be annoying in that they are often placed in locations of a web page that interrupt the user's reading or interaction with content on the page, are contextually irrelevant, and/or are otherwise disruptive of the web browsing experience. The situation is compounded when dealing with websites featuring UGC because contributors to such sites often have a low tolerance for advertisements on the sites that are perceived as not relevant to the content. At the same time, advertising is one of the primary ways in which website operators offset the cost of producing content and otherwise maintaining websites.